There was a time when websites are used to be nothing but just a bunch of texts in a HTML file; but as time passes on, both the technology and internet speed grows, our perception about website also started changing rapidly. Now-a-days a normal webpage have more than 50% of it’s content as some kind of image, used to ornament the website design or to convey something in a easily understandable graphical manner. Though we all know that images are great for both making a website look better and to convey something in easy and engageable manner, but when it comes to speed, images are one of the biggest culprit to make your website load slower. As images are big in size and takes a bit of time to download all those images in your browser, so there is no surprise there.

One of the easiest way to fight this problem is by using proper dimension for your images and to optimize them. By “proper dimension” I mean don’t add a 1024px image in your webiste and then shrink it down via CSS to 100px. If you need a 100px image, upload that exact size only. There is no benefit for adding a large image if you are not going to show it in a large manner.

Now when it comes to image optimization some people often ask that why should we need it? Well you see, when any image been captured by any camera or been generated by any software like Photoshop or Illustrator, in both cases the image file consist of color data and metadata, most of which are no use for your website. But as those data are part of that file, it makes the size of that image file bigger. Now as we human can only see color wavelengths from about 390 to 700 nm, there are really no benefit of keeping the extra colors in your photos as they will just make your file size larger for no good reason. The same principle is used in video compression too, if you are more interested about these compressions, you can watch this fun video about how YouTube handles their video compression. Though it is not exactly same as image compression, but it will give you some perspective. 🙂

So obviously as WordPress is one of the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world and extremely easy to use, there are tons of image optimization plugin out there in the WordPress plugin repository. Now almost each of them has some sort of free version with extreme limitations and then you can upgrade to paid version for the full image optimization suite. So, today in this article I’m going to test out most of the popular WordPress image optimization plugin to find out truly the best WordPress image compression plugin in this image compression war. I’ll include both the free and paid version of these plugins in this test and in the end I will share my results with you guys along with the download link of the sample & compressed files.

The difference between Lossless & Lossy image compression

Before I begin further, I need to clarify one thing, i.e. the difference between the two types of image compression techniques, lossless and lossy. The reason I need to explain this is because a lot of my visitors who are reading this article may not be familiar with these terms and I’m going to use both terms a lot below, so this is really important that you know what they are and what are their difference.

What is lossless compression?

Well as the name suggests, lossless compression is a process which does not mess with your image’s color data. As I mentioned earlier, each image has some color data and metadata. In lossless compression, the compression algorithm only finds and deletes the unimportant metadata of your image files, like with what camera the picture was taken, what lens was used, what was the focal length, aperture, what was the geolocation of the image etc. These things are completely unnecessary for your website as in most cases you are never going to use these data on your website. So, the lossless compression algorithms finds and deletes these metadata from your images, making your image size smaller.

But you have to keep in mind that lossless compression doesn’t touch the color data of any image regardless of the color wavelength that can’t be visible by humans, it will keep those data intact. Generally with lossless compression you can achieve 2% to 37% size reduction on your images based on how many unnecessary metadata that image has.

What is lossy compression?

Lossy compression is a very sophisticated compression technique which requires many complicated mathematical algorithm, program and powerful server to handle them. That is why most image compression plugins allow lossy compression only on their paid plans and lossless compression for free plans. Anyways, with lossy image compression technique, the image generally get passed to a highly sophisticated program, that analyze all the data present within that image, including its metadata and the various colors that the image has. Then it simply removes all those color data that will simply not be visible by human eyes along with the unnecessary metadata.

As a result of this after optimizing an image with lossy compression system, you can achieve file size reduction around 40% to 97%, making the file really small but to a naked human eye who is going to see that image on your website just for few seconds or minutes, it makes no visual difference. Moreover as your file size are smaller, your overall website size gets reduced too and your website loads much faster.

But the problem with lossy compression is that, not all lossy compression company uses super high quality algorithms. So, in many cases if your image consist of thin texts, you may see some image degradation & pixelation. But again, as I have been using lossy compression on my site for years now, I have only see it happen with some compression company. But if you stick with a good compression company, you may never face any issues like this, but this is the only downside to lossy image compression technique.

My image compression test contestants

I’ve tried to take as many popular WordPress image compression plugin into my consideration, but still if I’ve somehow skipped the plugin you are currently using on your site or you love a lot, you can just simply download the sample files that I’ve used in my test and run it through your image compression plugin and then at last compare it’s size with the ones I’ve tested. Now I’ve actually used both of it’s free and paid version for the compression plugins I’ve used in my test. So I will break down the final result into two categories, one for the free image compression plugins and the other for their paid plugins. Here are my test contestants:

WP Smushit plugin has been created by WPMU Dev team and exists in the WordPress plugin repository for years now. Here are a few pros & cons of this plugin as per my personal experience and consideration.

Pros

Allows only lossless image compression for the free version of the plugin and both lossless & lossy compression (Super Smush) for the paid version of the plugin

For the paid version users, email support is fast and fluid

Cons

The maximum file size allowed in the free version of this plugin is only 1MB which is extremely low in my opinion, but with the paid version you will have 32MB file size limit

There is no web interface to compress the images, you must need to use the plugin only

The plugin will only compress images that are uploaded by WordPress media uploader, you cannot custom specify any path to be compressed by the plugin. So, in short, you cannot compress images that are bundled with your theme or plugin folder

Optimus is relatively new image compression plugin in the WordPress marketplace. The optimus image compression plugin has been made by the awesome team behind KeyCDN content delivery network. Here are a few pros & cons of this plugin as per my personal experience and consideration.

Pros

Optimus supports creation of WebP format for your JPEG or PNG images. WebP is an extremely lightweight image extension created by Google to make image size smaller without losing any noticeable image quality. But the only downside is that WebP only supports in a hand few browsers (mostly webkit type) like chrome, opera etc. After you have WebP version of your image, you can use cache enabler plugin to incorporate it with your site properly.

Cons

Optimus is just a lossless image compression plugin, there is no lossy image compression option even in the paid version

The free version of this plugin only allow max file size upto 100KB, which is insanely low but if you go with their paid version of the plugin, it will only get bumped up to only 5MB

Just like WP Smushit, there is no web interface for Optimus either, so the only way you can use this compression service is through their WordPress plugin

Just like WP Smushit, this plugin will also compress images that are only uploaded by WordPress media uploader, you cannot custom specify any path to be compressed by the plugin. So, in short, you cannot compress images that are bundled with your theme or plugin folder

Shockingly enough, even after you buy a license of Optimus, there is no special email or phone support for the paid users. You will only get a hand few previously written article, besides that if you need any other help, you need to contact them via WordPress free plugin support forum, just like a free user

While testing Optimus in several servers I’ve often encountered various HTTP error issues like 204 error, especially if I used it on a test site where I was using any other image compression plugin earlier before installing Optimus.

The allowed image formats are also extremely limited to only JPEG & PNG. That’s it!

Honestly, I wasn’t quite happy with the plugin. The result you will get with Optimus, you can even get the same (or even better result) with free plugins like EWWW Image Optimizer (will cover it below), so personally I really don’t see any reason for wasting money on this plugin. In-fact after my testing I was thinking about asking for a refund for this plugin as I’ll never use it on any of my personal or client’s site, but again despite being a paid plugin with no email support, I couldn’t asked for that either. In short I’ve wasted 19$ for this experiment.

Anyways, let’s move on to our next contestant.

Imagify is another relatively new image compression plugin in the WordPress marketplace. It has been created by WP Media team, the guys behind super popular WP Rocket cache plugin. Here are a few pros & cons of this plugin as per my personal experience and consideration.

Pros

Imagify supports both lossless (Normal Mode) and lossy (Aggressive & Ultra Mode) image compression in both free and paid version

Instead of having different version of a single plugin (Free & Paid), Imagify actually use the account API concept. So, even if you are just going to use Imagify for free, you still need to create an account on their website and in return you will get 25MB of free bandwidth each month to optimize your images. Then if you consider moving to the paid version, you just login to your Imagify account, give your card details and choose your monthly plan. That’s it. Pretty sweet and simple

Imagify also uses some unique billing concept for image compression bandwidth. If you don’t wanna go with a monthly plan and instead just wanna buy some bandwidth as a one time payment, you can do that too

The user interface of imagify plugin is very engaging and intuitive. Clean flat design with some awesome design element. Really nice user experience

Imagify also comes with a web interface unlike the plugins mentioned above, so if you are working on a development project and quickly wanna compress some images, you can easily do that from the web image compression interface found inside your imagify account

Support for Imagify is great too

Cons

The max filesize limit in both the WordPress plugin and web image compression interface for the free imagify account is 2MB, which is average in my opinion. But for the paid account, there is no max file size restriction, which I haven’t seen in any other image compression plugins

There is no WebP support for Imagify in both the plugin & web interface (as of yet)

While testing I’ve seen that with the Ultra Mode of Imagify compression, sometimes there is quite noticeable amount of image degradation, especially if you have texts in your images. So, I will personally recommend Imagify users to stick with the Aggressive Mode for image compression without any noticeable image degradation

Just like WP Smushit, Optimus and others, this plugin will also compress images that are only uploaded by WordPress media uploader, you cannot custom specify any path to be compressed by the plugin. So, in short, you cannot compress images that are bundled with your theme or plugin folder

The allowed image formats are limited to JPEG, PNG & GIF only

Enough about imagify, now let’s move on to our next contestant.

Kraken.io is another image cempression plugin that many people use on daily basis. Here are a few pros & cons of this plugin as per my personal experience and consideration.

Cons

There is no bulk optimizer within Kraken’s WordPress plugin. You have to manually select with old image you wanna compress and then run kraken. Alternatively you can run kraken for each media library page too. But if your site has tons of image with hundred of pages, you can truly see the pain in this

The max file size for the free accounts (both in web interface and plugin) is 1MB, which is relatively low in my opinion. But with the paid account the max file size limit gets bumped to 32MB

Kraken is relatively costlier than any of it’s competitors, starting from $5/mo just for 500MB bandwidth

There is no WebP file creation support in Kraken yet

The user interface of the WordPress plugin is not as good as plugins like Imagify or TinyPNG

Just like WP Smushit, Optimus and others, this plugin will also compress images that are only uploaded by WordPress media uploader, you cannot custom specify any path to be compressed by the plugin. So, in short, you cannot compress images that are bundled with your theme or plugin folder

Now let’s move on to our next contestant.

TinyPNG is a very trusted name in the image optimization industry. They are around in this compression game for years and has a reputation for generation the best compressed image without any noticeable image degradation. Here are a few pros & cons of this plugin as per my personal experience and consideration.

Pros

Has great user interface, especially in the bulk image optimization page

Uses almost the same billing structure like Imagify and Kraken. To use TinyPNG image compression with your WordPress site, first you need to apply for a developer API, which needs to be inputted within your WordPress plugin

Provides free web image compression interface at tinypng.com to anyone (no need for any account) for any number of images you want, just the max filesize limit is 5MB, which is enough in my opinion

Cons

Unlike other image compression plugins, who relies on a bandwidth limit, TinyPNG counts each compression regardless of your image size. This can be both good and bad. Like for example if you are uploading a small 300px X 300px image, the size of the main file itself may be pretty small. So, if you mostly upload small images in your site then with a small bandwidth you can actually compress more images. But as TinyPNG counts the number of compression and not it’s size, so uploading a big and small image both is same to TinyPNG. This can be beneficial for people who mostly upload big images

With free TinyPNG account you will get 500 free compression each month with max filesize limit of 5MB. Now even if you started paying for TinyPNG API, the max file size limit will still remain at 5MB

There is now WebP image conversion support for TinyPNG

It support the least number of file types, only JPEG & PNG, nothing else

TinyPNG is a fully lossy compression system, it doesn’t provide any type of lossless compression whatsoever

Now let’s move on to our last contestant in this test.

Unlike the image compression plugins that are mentioned above which are mostly created by some companies and a team of developers, EWWW on the other hand has been created by a person single handedly named Shane Bishop. This is one of the most popular free image compression plugin in the WordPress plugin directory and is been used by thousand of people every single day. Here are a few pros & cons of this plugin as per my personal experience and consideration.

Pros

There is no shackle in the free plugin, you can use it as much as you like, as long as your server resource supports the compressions

The free version of this plugin uses your server resource to optimize your images in lossless manner. So, if you have any decent hostings, you will be fine with it, unless you need lossy compression; for that you need a paid API key of EWWW Image Optimizer from their official website ewww.io

Support almost all file types like JPG, PNG & GIF for the free plugin and with paid API you can also optimize your PDF files too 🙂 I hope Shane brings SVG support pretty soon too

Has a ton of advance settings through which you actually insert any path of your server you like and EWWW will scan that path for any possible images and optimize that too, something that no other plugin provides

The max file size for the free plugin is complete depends on how much pressure your server can take. But for the paid API, the default file size limit is 50MB which is expandable just by sending a mail to EWWW Support

Works brilliantly with almost all third-party WordPress image or gallery related plugins

It has WebP file creation support too

Excellent support for both free and paid version of the plugin

Cons

The user interface of both the plugin and website is a bit clunky in my opinion and not much intuitive like Imagify. So, for a non-techie user the out-of-the-box experience could be a little cumbersome. But I can I understand the reason behind it. As a single person has to do all, unlike other plugins who has a dev team, it is quite hard to concentrate on a better looking design and at the same time the actual quality of the plugin. I just wish their website be a little more sophisticated

There is no web interface for EWWW either, so you can only use it within your WordPress using the plugin

For the paid version of EWWW Image Optimizer, it also uses the exact same kind of billing approach as TinyPNG. So, it count the number of image to be compressed regardless of it’s size

A quick look at the feature difference of these plugins

So, as I’ve already talked a lot about each of these plugins and their pros and cons (as per my opinion), let’s take a quick look at the feature difference list for all of these plugins in a easily understandable tabular form.

Let’s begin with the real image compression test

Now as I’ve considered both the free and paid version of these plugins, I’m going to break this test result into two segments. One test with only the free plugins and the other with the paid version of these plugins. Please note, the plugins which gives the same behavior on the free & paid versions (like imagify, kraken, tinypng etc.) with only space difference, I’ve included them in the paid test section as there is no functional difference there. Also I’ve included Optimus in the paid plugin test as the free 100KB file size limit is insanely small to run on the free test. Also as most plugin supports JPG & PNG images, each test will be further segregated into two segments, a test for JPG images and a test for PNG images. That being said, let’s begin.

WordPress Image Compression Free Plugins Test

In my free plugin test, the contestants are EWWW (Free) and WP Smushit (Free). So, let’s begin with our JPG image test for these free plugins. Here are the image compression test result for these free plugins.

Image Name & Dimension

Original Size

EWWW (Free)

WP Smushit (Free)

Test-Image-2048X1365

1.24MB

1.22MB

Skipped (> 1MB)

Test-Image-710X473

185KB

185KB

185KB

Medium-300X300

67.3KB

67KB

67KB

Small-Thumbnail-150X150

22KB

22KB

22KB

Here is a sweet before-after slider for your to see the visual difference between the original and the test image. As both of these free plugin uses lossless compression, so you are not supposed to see any kind of image degradation.

So, this ends our free WordPress image compression plugin test. So, as you have seen just like any other free image compression plugins, both of the above tested plugin uses lossless compression method, so there is no removal in the image color data (as explained above) and only unnecessary metadata has been removed. So, as a result, the percentage of image size reduction is pretty low. Now, it is time to begin our paid image compression plugin test.

WordPress Image Compression Paid Plugin Test

As explained above, in this segment the only paid plugin that is not capable of doing lossy compression is Optimis by KeyCDN and as Optimus provides as low as 100KB free file size limit in the free version of the plugin, it was really hard to add it in the above free plugin test. So, in this test except Optimus, all other plugin will be using their best possible compression level. So, let’s begin.

Just like we have done above, first we are going to run the JPG image compression test. So, here is the test results:

Image Name & Dimension

Original Size

TinyPNG

Karken

Imagify (Ultra Mode)

OptimusHQ

EWWW (Paid)

WP Smushit (Pro)

Test-Image-2048X1365

1.24MB

167KB

153KB

77KB

1.22MB

167KB

226KB

Test-Image-710X473

185KB

49KB

51KB

22KB

184KB

49KB

42KB

Medium-300X300

67.3KB

38KB

25KB

12KB

66KB

38KB

15KB

Small-Thumbnail-150X150

22KB

12KB

9KB

5KB

21KB

12KB

6KB

Now just like above, here is a before-after slider to check the visual difference between the original and compressed file.

With this, now our WordPress image compression plugin test ends. Now it is time to choose the best image compression plugin for WordPress.

Now let’s choose the best WordPress image compression plugin

Believe it or not, it is really hard to choose a winner as some plugins are really close to one another in some tests. If we look at the JPG image compression test result, everyone will think Imagify is the clear winner. But you have to keep in mind that in this test I’ve used the Ultra Mode of imagify which is not a recommended mode for any website, because with Ultra Mode if you look closely, the occurrence of visible image degradation is very high, so I will always recommend to stick with the Aggressive Mode in any production environment. In fact if you look closely at the before after slider above, you can see some minor image degradation with the Imagify compressed image. Again, this is obvious, as the name suggest, it is supposed to be an Ultra optimization which is not recommended.

Now, if you look at the next possible winner, it is an tie between EWWW Image Optimizer (Paid Version) & TinyPNG. The same thing happens in case of PNG optimization test too. In this test, Imagify is far behind, even with the Ultra Mode, and the winning plugin is a tie between TinyPNG & EWWW Image Optimizer (Paid Version).

Due to this tie, if we take the features of both possible winner plugin TinyPNG and EWWW (Paid) into consideration, it becomes much easier to choose the best image compression plugin for WordPress. It is undoubtedly EWWW Image Optimizer (Paid Version).

EWWW Image Optimizer has a ton load of features which no other plugin provides in the WordPress environment. I just wish that the user interface of EWWW Image Optimizer had been more intuitive and had SVG support along with a web interface for image compression. Maybe someday in future it will happen. Till then we have to live without it, but again the number of features provided by EWWW is really unparalleled to any other plugin out there, especially providing custom path to optimize any folder in your server.

Conclusion

I’ve spent a lot of time in this test to show you the honest truth about WordPress image compression plugins and their quality. I hope you guys will like it. There is always a myth among the newbie webmasters about whether or not to use lossy image compression for your website. I hope with this article you will see that if you choose a good compression system, there is no visible image degradation with lossy image compression. So, don’t listen to any marketing gimmicks and go with it, even if you have a photography website. But more importantly use a proper dimension image in your website. There is truly no benefit of adding a large image at the front end of your website if you don’t need that big image. 🙂

Feedback

What do you think about the above article? Have I missed your favorite optimization plugin? Do you use any of the above mentioned image optimization plugin? If you do, feel free to share your opinion about that plugin. Feel free to share thoughts about this important matter in the comment section below so that we can continue this conversation there.

Also if you want you can connect with me over twitter with my twitter handle @iSaumya. I’m looking forward to hear your thoughts on this and if this small piece of code helped you anyway. 🙂

17 Comments

Nice subject and coincidentally I just was reading a comparison about this subject just earlier today in which the free version of ewww didn’t work although it seemed to work in the admin, and ShortPixel Image Optimizer received the best marks.

I started using the free version of ewww when smushit stopped being free and it seemed to function well enough but I hadn’t compared the actual filesizes. What was less attractive about this version is that at some points I received messages about php modules or compression programs it couldn’t install and asked to do that manually. That made it something for more technical webmasters, and I guess a cloud service will solve that although that means making costs (what for a hobby website or very small business may be less attractive).

As a website owner and bottom line thinker there are only a few indicators of importance. First there is the need to make the website fast and functioning, the need for functionality and resources to run the website on. That is mostly solved by hosting, WordPress and a good theme and plugins. Second there is all that is effective in making the website attractive to users and making them perform the function the website is made for (sales, collecting emails or whatever). Seo and visual image quality is part of that and off course the content. Third there are the costs and that means both the cost of services and the maintenance.

When using cloud services like tinypng there can be surprises and keeping some track of the image-usage of the website becomes then more important. I noticed in using tinypng in combination with a theme and plugins that define together a lot of image sizes that the plugin calls the service for all defined image sizes regardless if there are sizes that are the same. One can say that it is not a good theme or a good plugin if it defines multiple logical names for the same image size, and one would be right, but I found that for instance the size 100×100 px was defined about 5 times and other sizes as well, making tinypng calls several times for the same size resulting in a bill of about 120 dollar total until I started looking and checked a lot of sizes off in the settings of the plugin.

A clever compression plugin could have compared the sizes itself and preventing duplicate calling of the compression service. It doesn’t make the plugin or service bad, but it is something to be alert of. A small website with such a theme/plugin combination can in such a case still result in unnecessary cost, since a budget of 500 free images per month is easily consumed if every new image results in 40-50 or so calls to the cloud service because of duplicate file size definitions and non-used post-types that are part of this theme or plugins.

I’m thinking that settings in a plugin like this is mostly a setup thing, so it may be not that user friendly or nicely presented, but if it’s set right there is no need to keep fiddling. So mostly I want a plugin that does what it should and has functions to both bulk optimize and individually optimize and that against the lowest cost. Reading your article I see you like the cloud version of ewww (logical since it frees local resources on the website from the compression task) and it has the same cost structure. What I then would need is a cost comparison to make a final choice. Is that a comparison you have made too, or did you limit to the cost structure and the technical aspects?

Two aside notes: In this article you use the table responsive method you shared in a previous article, but here I notice that in this case I miss oversight in this way because the first column scrolls out of sight, making me wonder about what column was what again further in the table and I think perhaps making a cel red suggests a less favorable content in that cell and if the value No in that cell is about not having a limitation red doesn’t seems a fitting color. It might be a good idea for the first part to either find a way to make the scrolling either effect only the second to last column or to make the table available as pdf that can be separately opened for overview.

In your article you say: “There is truly no benefit of adding a large image at the front end of your website if you don’t need that big image.” I think you meant that in the sense of the filesize of the image, but my first association in reading that was a different one thinking you where advising against don’t like people having large images on their pages as a user interface advice (where normally using large image sizes on pages is just a nice way to display the content in a user attractive manner). Thanks again, and keep up the good work. Hans

Hi Hans, Thanks for your in-depth reply like always. The best part about EWWW is that from the settings you can actually disable generating some image sizes you want. So if there is 5 image sizes that generate 100px X 100px image, you can disable generation 4 of those image sizes. I would highly suggest you to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U78FFkM582E as it will show you the step by step process of doing that.

Coming to the price point, EWWW (Paid) cost almost the same as TinyPNG but it has more features and awesome support. So in terms of per image cost, it is almost the same.

Regarding the big table, well, I know that is going to happen as it is a very big table that is why I’ve provided an image link just below the table which will give you an image version of that same table, in case you have problem seeing that table.

At last about the big image, what I tried to mean in in many themes developers include an image of 800px X 800px and then reduce the size of that image using css too 400px X 400px. So, I said, don’t do it. Why include a larger image if you are not gonna use the full size of it? Instead create a new image size for that 400px X 400px image and include that.

I’m glad that you liked it. Yes, making this article tool months and a lot of effort. Infact I have to code my custom before-after slider for this as well. So, yes in terms of money and time both are spent a lot in this article and I’m really glad to see that you liked it. 🙂

Kraken seems to be as good as TinyPNG and EWW in the results. The extensive features and interface bloat of EWW is not a point in its favor! Image optimization is a feature that you want to just add to WordPress and let it operate in the background with as low overhead as possible. Don’t make me think! Options are useless. Once you set them to the optimal level, you never want to deal with them again. So why not just make it optimal by default? I’d like to see a completely simple, no-settings, no-interface plugin for this functionality.

Hi, I cannot agree with you in this regards, but I get it from where you are saying this. You see most of the settings EWWW provides are really useful, for example optimizing images that are not inside your uploads folder. If you try optimizing your website you will see sometimes some images gets loaded from the theme folder or may be some plugin is adding some images within the page and those images are not optimized. Now with most of the other plugins you cannot ask the plugin to search others folders along with the upload folder to optimize any images present there. But in EWWW You can – https://i.imgur.com/VTF3eXF.jpg You can even ignore certain folders as well – https://i.imgur.com/LP1v0Jn.jpg. Trust me, when you dig deep in optimizing your website these things are more than just a life saver. For the other settings, generally you don’t need to change them, like for example the JPG Image Quality. But some people like to tinker with it, so it’s there if you need. I can go even deeper but it would just make the comment longer. In short every settings present in EWWW is there so that you can use it exactly the way you want and can squize the most out of it. Also each option has awesome description telling what does what. Also as you said, once you set it up, you never have to look back again, it just does all thing automatically. I don’t even remember when is the last time I visited the EWWW settings page to change any settings after I set it up. Hope this helps.

That’s exactly my point — you never go to those settings again, so they are useless and a distraction that adds ads and overhead to your admin. One thing you did not test was the speed of each plugin and how much of a burden they put on your server resources.

The extra features of EWW like the ability to optimize images outside the upload folders are useless if you use quality themes and set up your site properly. Even if you don’t, why keep a plugin active for a one time use feature? There are even other ways to do this.

Commercial plugins that sell themselves on the number of their features pollute WP and its markets by suggesting to less informed users that these features are essential. What results is costly bloat and a slow, cluttered WP Admin. This is ultimately bad for WP and its market.

Reading the other comments I get your point on enabling the ability to optimize images that are part of plugins and themes, although I would imagine themes and plugins to deliver already optimized images. Being able to put them through an image optimizer is nice when you want to add some extra security..

Having used some themes from Themeforest , I’m not always sure of the efficiency of those themes and how they use and optimize image sizes and such, but optimization of theme or plugin images would be a one time thing (I would hope) anyway. Luckily I see also themes that skip icon fonts and such and just include some svg’s for that purpose, resulting in lean images.

Having lots of options might also require a admin to study the compression methods and have specialized knowledge and simplicity probably would be best for the majority of small website users. Probably themes and plugins will get smarter in time and self-configure more and more.

For myself recurring cost is an issue, so i like that tinypng has a monthly budget of free optimizations where as I understand it the cloud (paid) version of ewww does not offer such a free budget for small websites. One image may be cut to a lot of sizes as a result of large themes and specialized plugins. A cost comparison would perhaps be usefull and it may be cost-efficient to go for a monthly budget based on size rather then number of optimized images.

Using tinypng I found at some point that some images where optimized to poor quality. I found that the theme and some plugins define the same image cropped size under different names and used functional names rather then size-related names in doing so. That means that sizes may have 4 or 5 declarations in WordPress and probably were pushed several times in the optimization process in the cloud. Each cycle removing some of the quality in case the optimization isn’t lossless.

I wonder if some optimizers handle such thing better then others. I solved it for now in the tinypng plugin by only selecting one image size per declaration so each image is only offered to the optimizer once. I would imagine however that an optimizer should be able to recognize if image-sizes are declared more than once and only optimize each pixel-size one time.

I would also like a plugin that precuts the full image size automatically, not depending on the uploader to prefit the imagesize but cropping it at upload. One could define all used image sizes offcourse, but some plugins use the full image size in their functionality, so having a specified size for the full image and having it cropped automatically would also be nice.

Hi Hans, Trust me I completely understand your point and believe it or not, most of the problems you are mentioning are simply because of badly coded themes, themes with some sort of PAGE BUILDERS. I know nowadays all themes in ThemeForest comes with some sort of Page Builder one way or the other and exactly that is why I’ve stopped using Themeforest themes for a long time. If I ever look at ThemeForest I always look for themes that DOESN’T COME WITH ANY PAGE BUILDERS. No matter how nice the theme looks if it comes with any page builder I simply don’t use and don’t recommend my clients to use them as well. Rather I ask them to take a look at MyThemeShop. I know their themes are not very visually appealing out of the box, but if you know basic coding you can add some amazing things to it.

Now the best part is the themes which don’t use any sorts of page builders, can code their themes following all the best coding practice guidelines of WordPress which page builder based themes cannot do and create the image related issues you have mentioned along with many other problems with scaling, adding custom features etc.

Also the thing you mentioned i.e. a smart plugin that will automatically understand the wrapper size and crop the images on the fly to the exact size it needs – is also available, basically it is a new feature added by EWWW Paid System calling ExactDN + API Bundle that will not only optimize your images but also provide you on the fly image cropping feature and premium CDN (powered by KeyCDN) for your images.

Thanks for answering. Page Builders are a special subject here, but not the base problem at this point. I’m not against Page Builders, but do not use any yet. The problem with page builders will also be incomporated by introducing the as yet planned Gutenberg, since there you get functionality to insert an image and then resize it at will.

When users start resizing that way, it doesn’t match the basically fixed character of the way images are inserted in HTML and it will be more difficult to decide in that manner what file to load in the page being as lean as possible. Also as yet Gutenberg hasn’t implemented responsive layouts, so the settings in block properties will be fixed for all sizes at this moment in time too, what often will not lead to an optimal display of content. Having css in the html code using style=”” attributes may then also pose challenges for using a styles.css to try to improve that responsiveness.

Regarding images in themes the number of different image-declarations add up swiftly. In my install we start with 4 image sizes by WordPress itself, then there are 4 for displaying the blog archive (for various display-options), 6 for different parts of the Sensei Course plugin, 6 for WooCommerce (3 new and 3 legacy), 1 for the opt-in plugin, 1 for a course widget, 1 for a Top10 post widget, 5 for the BlogCourse archive, 3 blog-thumbs, 1 for a mailchimp opt-in plugin and 1 for zooming the product photo in WooCommerce, resulting in a cool 33, most of which by the plugins used, and multiplied by 2 by using the retina 2x plugin for supporting retina display. That is after removing the 4 or 5 images (times 2) for the often added protfolip cpt.

So just by adding functionality and integration one is left with 66 to 76 image definitions just by that, many of them having the same values by default (since they are defined by functionality not by size), but able to differentiate if needed.So it is not mostly the theme and in this number page builders are not even a part.

I was pleased to find that in tinyPNG there now is an option to automatically crop and optimize the full image-size too, so that requirement is solved. Thanks for the tip on EWWW. I believe there is some sort of CDN-functionality for images in Jetpack too, although some have adviced no to use that.

Wow, that’s quite a lot of information. Thanks for the post and the tools. I always rely on Photoshop, I did have to download all images and compress them “manually” in PS. Thank you for the list of these image compression plugins but consistent with me, ShortPixel seems to be the first. Presently, I’m using a unfastened tool called tinypng as well. It’s not a plugin but it enables a lot to compress snapshots without dropping their quality. Having a good picture compression plugin will save a lot of our time. I’m without a doubt going to attempt many compression tools that you listed and will share my experience…!!!

As i said, I have personally used ShortPixels, Tinying and recently Optimus too, but now I have found permanent solution for image compression without any Subscription. I’m also planning to use Optimizilla website for online image compression. Its pretty cool and easy. I think everyone should try it atleast once. Also for newbie blogger, I would recommand WP Smush to start with. Then they can try other tools as they progress in blogging.

Anyways, thanks for taking the time to write such an extensive review on this subject, it should be very helpful for many bloggers. Please keep sharing and good luck.

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Hi, I'm Saumya Majumder, an engineer, tech enthusiast & programmer. Here in this blog I write mostly about starting & managing a blog, WordPress, Social-media, SEO and Making Money online, Adsense, latest tech products and software and many more thing. If you are also into the tech arena, you will definitely love the content of this blog (I hope).

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